Simon McDermott - The Songaminute Man - How music brought my father home again

As soon as he got through the front door at Kent Road, Ted woke up. ‘It was brilliant, Mom!’ he said the minute his eyes opened, and he went on to excitedly talk about the afternoon he’d had, sparing no detail. Soon after teatime, Ted was fast asleep again, so Hilda carried him upstairs, helped him out of his clothes and tucked him into bed. He was asleep the minute his head hit the pillow and Hilda carried his suit down to the kitchen, ready to wash it. She did the usual check of his pockets.

‘What the hell is this?’ she shouted. Her hands were full of jelly, cream and custard.

The suit was ruined. She was fuming.

‘Have you seen this?’ she shouted at Maurice, as if it was his fault. Maurice shook his head. He had no idea why Ted would do something so daft and he was angry that perfectly good material had been wasted.

The next morning Hilda was waiting in the kitchen when Ted came padding down the stairs, seemingly oblivious to what he’d done. ‘You’ve ruined that suit, you have … putting all that food in there. Didn’t you have enough to eat at the party?’

Ted looked distraught but Hilda suddenly realized what he’d done. ‘I only brought the food home for the others, Mom, so we could all share it because they didn’t get to come to the party.’ Hilda’s heart melted. She gave him a huge hug, explaining to him how he shouldn’t put jelly and custard in his pockets again, no matter how much he wanted to bring it home to share with the others.

The McDermott household was a thrifty one and, like Hilda, Ted was resourceful and would find unusual ways to help out. Sometimes, he and his friends would sneak through the fencing at the back of the house, and past terrifying Grumble, so that he and the other boys from his road could make their way down to the railway marshalling yard and pick coal that had been delivered for the steam engines from the sidings. It was something that would be repeated every winter and, as the boys got older, more and more planning went into it. ‘You could hear them all in the middle of the night,’ says Ted’s younger brother John. ‘Us younger ones would all be tucked up in bed and then you could hear Ted, Dad, Maurice and a couple of their friends going through the fence at the end of the back garden.’ Getting through the fencing was a mission, but once they were in, it was a free-for-all. ‘It’s what got us through those winters,’ says John.

They were canny too: one particular day the lads became aware that there was a copper down the road stopping locals suspected of taking the coal. So they decided to fill up some bags and hide them in the woods until the next morning when one of them could come back to collect them. It was a well-known fact that, if the copper did catch you, he would tell you off and confiscate the coal – before keeping it for himself.

‘There also used to be a big tree at the end of the garden and, one winter, some of the blokes from the street all helped to saw it down,’ says John. ‘The whole street shared that wood for months.’

As they got older, Ted and his gang spent every minute together and as soon as he arrived home from school, he would be straight out the door playing with the other children in the street. The boys were always getting up to mischief and, once they were old enough, the dares and tricks became more challenging. The gang – Joey B, Joey G, Kenny, Walter and Georgie – would head straight for the woods at the back of the garden to build dens or climb their favourite tree. It was thick, old and rotting and, one afternoon, it was decided that the tree was coming down. ‘You got your axe, Kenny?’ Ted shouted at his stocky school buddy striding towards him between the oaks. Kenny grinned, swinging the axe casually, even though it was bigger than him. It was his father’s and he wouldn’t have been too pleased if he’d known his son had taken it. Joey G was with Kenny, his very own axe slung over his shoulder. Joey B was already at the foot of the tree. He was the best climber of the lot of them: ‘Give him a leg-up, Walter.’ Walter dutifully did as he was told and the rest watched as Joey shimmied up to act as lookout.

The group set to work, taking turns to swing at the trunk. It was a test of pre-pubescent strength as much as it was a shared challenge. Ten minutes in and they were sweating like crazy. This was much harder than any of them had imagined and yet no one wanted to give up. A shout cut through the silence – ‘Copper’s coming!’ – from Joey, their lookout. One second of staring wide-eyed at each other, the next they were scrambling through the undergrowth to get away.

Joey B watched from the top of the tree as his friends scarpered. Where were they going? Oh, hell! He jumped. He heard rather than felt his leg break. The next confused thought – before the agony set in – was that he’d only told them he’d seen their mate Cooper coming. Joey B had no idea how long it took his mates to realize he wasn’t trailing behind them; eventually they came slinking back to find him rolling around on the ground, breathing through the pain and begging to be taken to hospital.

Injuries withstanding, the boys would knock for each other and then go off the beaten track, mostly finding places they shouldn’t be. One day that involved heading to the back of the woods, behind the football pitches, where there was an isolation hospital for people with infectious diseases. Patients with tuberculosis, smallpox and diphtheria were tended to by nuns; all the Wednesbury children were banned by their parents from getting too close. There were even rumours it was haunted. All the more reason to play knock and run … or so thought Ted. Although one of those days he wasn’t quick enough and one of the nuns caught a glimpse of him as they all knocked on the door and sprinted away. She marched to the house and told Hilda everything, meaning that Ted was rewarded for his daring with a smack from his mum and a stern warning of what would happen if he ever did anything like that again.

Smacks weren’t rare: Maurice and Hilda were loving but strict. People sometimes assumed that children from big families could get away with anything, but that wasn’t the case with Ted’s family. His parents were caring of course, but if any of the kids stepped out of line they’d come down on them like a ton of bricks. The kids knew that when they walked out of their front door they were representing the family, so they had to look smart and behave. Some mothers used to say, ‘Wait till your dad gets home!’ – but Hilda wasn’t like that. She’d tell them off there and then and once they were disciplined, that was it; there was no waiting around until Dad got home to give them a hiding.

The first nine years of Ted’s life were set against the threat, and then the reality, of war. The young boys would often hear the distant roar of engines and, a few minutes later, they would look up and see the skies had turned black as the bombers flew across to Germany. When Ted was small, Hilda and Maurice did all they could to keep things normal for the children, but the stark realities were impossible to hide and the constant threat of bombing was the main source of angst for the adults, even if the children enjoyed the drama. At the back of the house a small air-raid shelter had been built with care by Maurice just before the war started. Whenever the air-raid sirens went off, Hilda, Maurice and the elder McDermotts hushed the babies and placed them gently in drawers that they covered with blankets while the rest of the family squeezed into the shelter. As she always did, Hilda would stand on the doorstep shouting for all the kids by name, until every single one of them came running down the street and flying into the shelter. Once they were all safely inside she would get in herself, satisfied that everyone was accounted for.